All posts in PS Programmes

Gatwick Airport – The hero of the hour? – I can’t decide if it’s more like Wall-E or Johnny 5.

If your family is driving you crazy at Christmas, spare a thought for those whose travel plans have been disrupted by the drone incident at Gatwick Airport. Here are the numbers at the time of writing this…

Over 1,000 flights cancelledAirport shut down three times over three days 140,000 passengers stranded

Here at PS Programmes Towers, we travel a lot for business, and a few years back got caught up in the fallout of Eyjafjallajökull, the eruption that did for air travel what it just did to our spellcheck. But we’re not just seeing ourselves bedding down for the night on the shiny floor of the North Terminal; we chair aviation conferences / summits and write crisis communications and contingency plans for the aviation industry. So, our interest is more professional than pure sympathy.

Crisis communications – because saying nothing is not an option…

Donald Trump has made many of us in the communications business shift uncomfortably in our seats in the last couple of years.

When Trump became President, he pretty much took the standard advice of the speaker coach, screwed it up, and threw it back in our faces: be clear in what you mean, we said. Own your authority on what you’re talking about, we said, and admit when you don’t. Thank other people, be the best version of yourself you can be, give people something to aspire to.

As a speaker, Trump is boring, repetitive, ill-informed, divisive, unaffecting and a million other things that we’d warn you away from. Clear message? No, he rambles and repeats, so that people take away what they think they’ve heard. Authority? Nobody has better advisors than the US President, but Trump’s commentary sounds like he glimpsed a headline over someone’s shoulder. And as for being the best version of yourself, the president’s crossed arms / bottom lip out pose is familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to get a four-year-old to eat their greens.

Kofi A. Annan – ‘An African at heart, but a global citizen, symbolising the best of humanity’.

Recently, the world lost Kofi Annan, the former United Nations Secretary-General. I along with many others was saddened to hear the news of Kofi Annan’s death and felt extremely lucky to have met the great man – the ultimate diplomat. I interviewed him on a couple of occasions and was struck by his careful judgment and his strong moral conviction. Continue reading →

How to…Speak to a parliamentary select committee

Though some of us will have seen the bawdy Prime Minister’s Questions every Wednesday at 12 noon, a lot of parliament’s work is done in select committees. A select committee is made up of a number of members of parliament, and deals with particular issues relating to the governance of the country. They are often investigative in nature, some are long standing (such as the Economic Affairs Committee, or the Science and Technology Committee), others collect data or evidence to cover a particular issue, and dissolve immediately once they have reported back. Continue reading →

Trusted Savings Bank?

Imagine opening the banking app on your phone and looking at the balance. It seems surprisingly high. You look more closely, and don’t recognise the recent transactions. Then you see the name: it is not your account. When you’re sorting out whether you feel the thrill of eavesdropping or the fear that you’ll get in trouble for somehow hacking into a stranger’s account, you might shortly feel the dawning horror that someone else could be looking at your own account right now.

The Business Book Awards 2018

At last week’s inaugural Business Book Awards ceremony in Central London, Lucy McCarraher said in her welcoming speech that she had set up the awards in partnership with Thinkfest, in response to changes in the business book market: ‘Business books themselves have increased in quality as well as quantity. Overall, business authors have become more sophisticated in the way they write really good and valuable books; they have learned better how to engage their readers and take them on an enlightening journey. And these smart books have in turn stoked a real hunger in their readers. In conversations or on social media, business people are always sharing and on the lookout for the latest information and insights that peers and mentors have put into print.’Continue reading →

Kentucky Fried Crisis

We have three golden principles when it comes to communication: authority, authenticity and audience. Usually, we apply them to speaking in public and giving presentations – but they work well across other communications as well. Forget about where you put your feet on stage and what font looks good on a poster; instead ask if what you’re saying (or doing) is right for the target audience, whether it has the weight of authority behind it, and whether it is authentic.

You really need to get these three things lined up – if your authority wobbles, you’re in trouble. If your message is directed at the wrong audience, it won’t land as it should. And as recent events have shown, if the public thinks your message is less than authentic, it can be catastrophic for your reputation.

So how have two organisations KFC and Oxfam, who have both had their communications in the spotlight recently faired?

How to write books and influence people

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even packs of chimpanzees do it. And we do it – sometimes. Sharing knowledge is what holds a community together, whether that’s warning of predators, advertising food sources or playing a game. When humans share knowledge, we codify and formalise and put it in a curriculum. What we learn tells us who we are; if you want to know something about someone, take a look at their bookshelf.

Books can have a huge influence on society: JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series is credited with encouraging a generation of children to read for pleasure (and it’s paid off – the Harry Potter brand has been calculated as being worth $25 billion and that’s as of 2016, so this has probably gone even further north.Continue reading →

‘What AI means for leaders’

Automation has already touched every industry on the planet: whether it’s sorting the rotten apples out of a harvest or customers scanning their own shopping at a supermarket checkout, machines are deeply entwined in our lives, whether we notice them or not.

It’s tempting, especially for those of us whose skill set falls in what might broadly be called ‘the creative industries’, to think that we are immune from the onslaught of smart machines: who wants a robot to present their conference? Or design their logo? Or write a restaurant review (‘I started with a delicious WD40 before moving onto the main course…’)? But the reality is that nobody is going to fail to feel the touch of artificial intelligence in their lives, and that means in their jobs. Continue reading →